After seeing the Agenda for this month’s Senate meeting I thought I would post it up for everyone to see what Senate does on a month to month basis. I’ve included a little background on each item that I think is significant. If you have any questions feel free to contact me!

THE THIRD REGULAR MEETING OF THE VANCOUVER SENATE FOR THE 2009/2010 ACADEMIC YEAR – WEDNESDAY NOV. 18 7:00pm ROOM 182 IRVING K. BARBER

1. Minutes from the Meeting of October 14, 2009
2. Business Arising from Minutes
3. Remarks from the Chair and Related Questions

This is a monthly report from the President on the business of the University. What he says here is a mystery until the night of.

4. Candidates for Degrees and Diplomas

Graduating students and conferring degrees is the Senate’s most important job. A list of students eligible for graduation in November will be presented for approval. Its a big deal but won’t be much debate and it’ll be over in 5 minutes or less.

5. Financial Statements 2008/2009 and Budget Model

This is a really big deal for faculties and departments. The financial statements from last night will be meh but the new budget model will be very interesting. In light of the $20-$30 million structural deficit the university is working on a new way approach its budget. Key parts of it will include how faculties are allocated resources. There have been several versions of this being passed around and it has been changing on basically a daily basis. This isn’t for approval or endorsement, it is simply a presentation on where they are at and to solicit feedback from the senate. It will be interesting to see how reward based the structure is and how teaching issues (classroom sizes and such) are included. Bijan and Mike might know more about this process than me.

6. Report from the Provost and Vice President, Academic on UBC Equity and Diversity Strategic Plan

This is a presentation for information to Senate regarding the development of the Equity and Diversity Strategic Plan (EDSP). The EDSP is a small (but important) part of the overall Place and Promise strategic plan. If you look at the Place and Promise homepage you won’t find Equity and Diversity as a specific line. The relation between these smaller, more specific strategic plans (aboriginal SP or sustainability SP for example) and the overall plan is quite hazy. However, if you look between the lines of the Place and Promise plan you can find the points of the EDSP within it. I think that this is because of overlap between the smaller plans will lead to repetition in the larger plan if they were included as they are. You could imagine for example that there is significant overlap between the EDSP and the Aboriginal SP.

Check out the EDSP homepage for more specific info. What I can say that it has been an absolute pleasure to work with individuals from Access and Diversity and UBC should be proud to have such a dedicated group of staff.

7. Place and Promise: The New UBC Strategic Plan

This is a big one.
Place and Promise is the new guiding document at UBC. It will replace Trek 2010 as the most cited document on campus. Writing this document is very much akin to standing in front of the mirror analyzing what issues are a priority for you now. Are they different than they were 10 years ago? Will they be different 10 years from now? Answering these questions has been the task of the 18 month consultation process.
Although consultation is over, I can guarantee you that students involved worked very hard to have a strong student voice included. You can never have enough student consultation in a document like this. I do think however that this is the most student consulted plan in the history of the institution. Reading through the goals and priorities of Place and Promise you really can get an image of UBC standing in front of the mirror. I believe that the plan reflects where students are at right now. I hope you agree.
I would encourage every student (especially student politicos) to read over Place and Promise on their homepage. It is now the job of students to keep the University on task to complete their goals in the document.
The unfortunate thing about documents like this is that they are uncomfortably general. Place and Promise is no exception. The reason is that in order to lay out a plan for 10 years you need to allow a little room for changes. Use this to your advantage!! Citing Place and Promise will be the way to push student issues in the next decade. Take notice, become familiar, prosper!

8. Academic Policy Committee

This motion is a proposal to support the creation of academic regulations that will support Joint Doctoral Programs, allowing a PhD student to do a doctoral degree jointly at UBC and another institution. Apparently this is something that is already happening but needs wording to support. I don’t know much more about it than that.

9. Admissions Committee

There are several motions in this agenda item. There are some mundane ones and some more significant ones. The mundane ones include changes in admission requirements to the Master of Occupational Therapy program, changes in admission requirements for the Doctor of Dental Medicine, and changes to LPI requirements for applications into the Arts One Program (they do their own test).

The first of the more exciting one is changes to the Arts and Commerce admissions. The intent is to accept grade 11 marks in replace of grade 12 ones where necessary to make a timely offer of acceptance. The substitution would be made if the student meets the following requirements:

a) the applicant is a secondary school applicant from outside BC (a process already exists to collect info fast enough for these students)
b) the applicant has all of the required courses completed or in progress
c) one or more of the approved grade 12 courses doesn’t yet have a grade
d) a grade in a comparable grade 11 course is available to substitute into the calculation of admission averages.

A pilot project was run over the last year to gauge the success of such a admissions change. The report predicted a ‘false admit’ rate of only 3% and only a third of them (4 students) took the offer of acceptance.

I’ve scanned the entire report onto my own site, its only 4 pages long and you can view it here.

The next admissions issue is regarding Applicants Following the Alberta Secondary School Curriculum. After much review and study a motion has been made to adjust Alberta applicants grades upward by 2%. UBC has a lot of data on students from Alberta is worried that we are not offering positions to some of their best students. Roughly the same amount of students receive an A in BC and Alberta (27.1% and 27.6% respectively). However, Alberta regards an A as 80%+ and BC regards it as 86%+ implying that we accept fewer Alberta students within the same percentile.

Alberta students have also been tracked throughout their first sessional grades at UBC and it has been shown that they do as well (if not better) than BC students at every entrance grade.

The full report can be found here.

The next item is a change in Minimum Standards in English for Secondary School Applicants. There is now a hard limit on how poorly applicants can do in high school English. You can no longer be admitted to UBC if your final English 12 (or 11 where applicable) grade is below 70%. There isn’t a lot of contention around this and it will affect relatively few students since very few people would be admitted based on their average with <70% in Grade 12 English.

10. Joint Report from Curriculum and Admissions Committees

One motion here that creates some new additions to the Doctor of Philosophy/Master of Science in Craniofacial Science/Diploma in Orthodontics/Diploma in Pediatric Dentistry. What a mouthful (haha I’m so witty).

11. Curriculum Committee

There are several changes to courses and programs but none of them are earth shattering. All of the changes are in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and apply to Applied Science, Arts, College for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Medicine. Let me know if you want some more details.

12. Nominating Committee on Culture of Service

Student Senator Joel Mertens has put a lot of effort into getting student feedback on how to reward and encourage students and faculty more involved. There are some really cool things that might come out of this. The best thing to do is to is read the brief report that will come to senate here.
There has been some concern that, although students were consulted quite adequately, their views weren’t represented with more than a footnote on the first page. The Working Group focused on encouraging Faculty service, which is fine, but it is important to include the comments of all members consulted so that they can be used in the future. I have discussed my concerns with Agenda Committee and the report might be changed to include this when it is presented in two weeks.
Either way there is a lots to be gained from this report and I hope that the discussion continues around Culture of Service and some more tangible recommendations come forward. As good as the ones in here are, I fear they will be lost in translation down the power chain.

13. Student Awards

Yay!! More money for students is always good. It is especially good to see donors showing their faith in UBC through donations, especially in these economic times. It is a testament to our Alumni community. $27,500 has been added to the awards chest. Don’t get to excited though $27,000 is going to Law student bursaries and $500 is going to Commerce (specifically the student with the highest grade in COMM 394). Tune in next month to see if the Award Lottery shines on your faculty.

14. Proposed Agenda Items
15. Other Business
16. Tributes Committee – In Camera

This is always fun. Here we pass the recommended nominees to receive Honorary Degrees from UBC. There are the old people who you graduate with in May. Unfortunately you are not allowed to know who they are until they actually accept the nomination. They are always exciting though and this year should be no different.

Can you imagine that we are going to get all that done in 2 1/2 hours (AMS hacks take note)? I would love to have your feedback on this so either post a comment below, message me, or e-mail me.

Hopefully see some of you there in two weeks, you won’t be disappointed I promise!

Geoff